Darwin’s finches in Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands are cornerstones to the late British naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection: the size and shape of the finches’ beaks are adapted to take advantage of their individual ecologic niches.

Some of the sparrow-sized songbirds have large beaks which are able to crush hard seeds—an especially useful trait in drought-prone regions. Other finches have short, sharp beaks which are good for eating insects.

Survival of the fittest is a simple reality in the game of life. Successful play necessarily requires a degree of selfishness, but across the animal kingdom species have evolved social behaviors. Why? Do they enhance survival?

“Many of us are really fascinated with the wide spectrum of social behavior we see across the diversity of animal taxa,” said Janis Dickinson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Berkeley.

They don’t sting or bite. They don’t cause diarrhea or headaches. They don’t even exist in a tangible form. But “digital organisms”— special programs that reproduce, mutate, and adapt —can thrive inside computers, and they are teaching scientists several lifetimes worth of information about evolution.

These artificial “bugs” show that complex functions that are the digital equivalent to something like human eyesight can evolve from the simplest of functions via a long and winding road of gradual mutation, according to a team consisting of a biologist, a computer scientist, a philosopher, and a physicist.